Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/217

 THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY 20$

distance from himself in the activities of other persons while this fact becomes a very significant factor in the most practical calculations of politics and business, the present tendencies in social theory and practice so strongly favor this side of the facts that emphasis of the personal side, the individual aspect, of the situation is imperative.

As a mere latest and highest order of the animal kingdom, the human race is simply a mass of matter formed by the opera- tion of physical forces, and distributed through space by the operation of other physical forces. So far, the human race is one aggregate, as truly as the land and the water of the earth's surface, or the atmosphere that surrounds the earth, or the system of the starry host that fills the heavens. As a conscious company, however, the human race is not one aggre- gate, but a whole composed of as many distinct and self- impelled units as there are persons in the human family. We have taken due account of the fact that society is always and inevitably conditioned by its character as a portion of flotsam and jetsam within a physical environment, and furthermore as a portion of that environment. But society, in that portion of its character which sociology has especially to consider, is not matter, but persons. These persons have such fundamental likenesses that certain general propositions are true of them all, and we both may and must think of them as one and inseparable. They have such decisive differences that we have to count with them as though they were radically and finally separate.

To express the facts in an illustration, society is not a machine, a locomotive, for instance. Society has no single motor contrivance which furnishes power to all other parts of the machine. Society has no fire-box and boiler which send steam into the cylinders, and society does not transfer force from certain active parts to certain inert parts, so that the latter have power of motion. The trucks of the locomotive could not move of themselves. The driving-wheels could not move of themselves. The connecting-rod could not move of itself. The piston could not move of itself. The water could not boil of itself. Society, on the contrary, is a whole made up of